2011-03-18

Daffy Ducking

The UN Security Council brought me to tears as China and Russia abstained instead of vetoing resolution 1973. Thankyou guys - I know how difficult that was for you, and I have a lot of respect for you. Germany - you should have known better and have no excuse. Why do you need to be on the wrong side of so many military events? What are they teaching you at school? War is bad or War for bad ideologies is bad? It should be the latter. If you rule out wars of liberation, you may as well disband your police as well, as police often need to use violence to "liberate" individuals.

Ok, first the bad news. As far as I can tell, there isn't a blanket allowance for air strikes, which are really what is required to usher the rebels to victory. The air strikes (ie of ground targets) are only allowed if someone is threatening civilians. Which means that if Gaddafi puts his tanks in the desert and fires at military targets way away from towns, the rebels will not have what is required to break out of Benghazi. The ruling simply protects Benghazi's ability to retain its territory.

If we focus on civilians - let's say we don't want a single civilian killed - sanctity of life etc. What both sides need to do is get out into the desert to fight it out. Unfortunately, Gaddafi probably still has better ground hardware, although maybe that is no longer true after a recent defection. Regardless, Egypt now has the ability to provide weapons over the border, and those weapons can reach Benghazi without being attacked from the air. So this should make Benghazi the strongest power.

Then the rebels can get out into the open and "do the right thing" by engaging in desert warfare.

Of course, now that Gaddafi has inferior weapons and numbers, he will be no longer be interested in desert warfare, and stay in the towns he currently controls.

So imagine a particular bit of Gaddafi territory is surrounded. What then? The rebels can and probably should assault the town, with the allied aircraft not being concerned about casualties caused by the rebel assault. And technically I blame Gaddafi for that anyway, as if he was a decent ruler he would put his forces out into the desert for annihilation instead of hiding behind civilians.

There is one other option. The locals could gather in large demonstrations again. Of course Gaddafi can't afford that to happen, so he will shoot them. The first civilian shot gives the allied planes the right to attack Gaddafi's forces, even if they are in the city.

However, either way you go, civilians die.

So here's yet another proposal:

Do the same thing that Cuba's "revolutionaries" did - just buy off the security forces so that they don't fight. Give them a carrot and stick option. They can either take some money and get safe passage out, or face certain annihilation at the hands of both advancing rebels and civilians. You'd have to be a complete and utter drongo to turn that down! And as they start defecting, the position becomes more and more futile.

So first things first - get that equipment in from Egypt and be the most forbidable ground force in Libya. Not sure how long that will take. Then go and surround/relieve some town like Brega. No need to wait for western planes - there's nothing for them to do until Gaddafi is stupid enough to put a plane in the air. Just the threat of aircraft being available should be enough to keep Gaddafi out of the sky.